Foolishly, I let MS compact my mail box yesterday, and instead of compacting and hiding away old messages as in last year, it removed all messages from this past February through yesterday. I know where the dbx file of my inbox is, but does anyone know how to restore that to my inbox? There are a bunch of messages in there that I need to keep. Why do the programmers think they know better than me what messages I should keep. This is MS Outlook Version 6, an old, old version.